Tag Archives | teaching

…Let’s start a serious conversation about retention and teacher development, to stop the wholesale wastage of expertise in both schools and universities to which the current situation is leading and to show that we are serious about sustainable, long-term investment in the thing that matters – the quality of teaching in schools.

Nobody is going to argue that high levels of teacher stress and consequent attrition are a good way to run an education system; even if they (possibly) get ‘results’ in the short-term, their longer-term damage is both an educational and a moral hazard…

This is the final part of three short segments of an interview with Ralph Leighton who is a teacher educator who has been involved in the development of citizenship as a subject. In Part Three Ralph talks frankly about challenges he has faced so far and his key influences including Postman and Weingartner’s ‘Teaching as […]

England is ranked the worst country in Europe for the level of acquisition of foreign languages amongst teenagers. And yet for decades, English schools have tried to improve this situation, perhaps most notably through experimenting with teaching modern foreign languages in primary schools (PMFL). Clearly, something has gone wrong…

This is part two of three short segments of an interview with Ralph Leighton who is a teacher educator who has been involved in the development of citizenship as a subject. In Part Two Ralph talks about ‘teaching as a profession’ and ‘teaching at its best’.

…there is a real mismatch between what teachers, leaders and policy makers feel research should do and what it actually does…Engaging with theory is difficult and bringing it to bear on real classrooms is even more so, but this does not mean we should abandon it.

Ben Goldacre’s recent call for more randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in education has renewed interest in evidence-based or -informed practice. Large-scale syntheses of existing studies, such as John Hattie’s, have also become popular reading. While such evidence is thought to tell us ‘what works best’, it does not always reveal why. It is also not […]

My point..is the highly detrimental effect the high accountability and data-driven regime is having on schools and on education…I’d like to look at a process that I think is particularly damaging. The process comes from the constant need for schools to show ‘progress’ and for pupils to take a childhood-ignoring upward path to ever greater […]